Description
For this piece, I wanted to try leaning more towards feelings of self-consciousness and how it can affect the way we view who we are, and how societal standards restrict us from being our vulnerable, true selves. I first started by sketching out some ideas in my sketchbook, I knew I wanted the figure to be a rabbit because they are said to symbolize innocence and vulnerability. Some of them were portraits, but I ultimately chose to do her full body to show her posture as timid and shy. I was having a difficult time mapping it out so I took some reference photos of myself to better see how the anatomy would roughly work, and then I just adapted it to incorporate some rabbit features like her ears, tail, and feet (features representing her insecurities). At first, I wanted to go traditional with this piece, using acrylics and oil pastels, but it didn’t give the effect that I wanted, and I didn’t like the texture. So I decided to go digital with it using my iPad, apple pen, and Procreate (art software). I did this to get a more graphical and rough look to my piece, thickening and emphasizing many of her features to represent how we view our insecurities much more prominently than they actually are. Because she is so self-conscious about herself she tries to cover herself in order to fit in, wrapping her ear down, putting on very serious business clothing, and trying to shove he feet in some nice proper shoes. But no matter how hard she tries to fit in, she can’t seem to hide anything, her ears are just too big to wrap down, her tail and legs are ripping through the seams of her pants, and her feet are ripping apart the shoe with their size. For the brushes I mostly used the soft chalk brush to give a very rough and texture look, making sure the line work is very thick and bold, also used it for shading and highlighting areas of the character to add more depth to her figure. I just used the round brush to get the main base colors down on the line art.
